This took me a while to figure out, so here's a fix for an annoying problem:

Let's say that you have a media box running Kodi on your local area network. You have uPNP turned on so you can stream videos from your media box across your LAN. You want to use VLC to watch stuff across your LAN.

Problem: When you select your Kodi box in VLC and double-click on the server to open the directory of media to watch, VLC crashes with no error message (even in debug mode).

Explanation: VLC is configured to exit when the current playlist is over. This includes downloading a playlist across the network, and is really irritating.

As the title of this post implies, I've been working on some stuff lately that's been taking up enough compute cycles that I haven't been around to post much. Some of this is due to work, because we're getting into the really busy time of year and when I haven't been at work I've been relaxing. Some of this is due to yet another run of dental work that, while it hasn't really been worth writing about has resulted in my going to bed and sleeping straight through until the next day. And some of it's due to my hacking on a new project that wound up being... not as hard as I'd imagined it would be, but there certainly has been a steep learning curve.

I've mentioned once or twice that I have a media box at home running Kodi on top of Arch Linux. Once you've got your media drives registered and indexed, it's pretty easy to use. Save for the clock in the upper right-hand corner of the display, which almost never seems to coincide with the timezone set when you install Arch. So I don't forget again, and to try to fix the problem of skillions of worthless threads on the Kodi forums, here's how you fix it from inside of Kodi when it's running:

Not too long ago, when the USB key I'd built a set-top media machine died from overuse I decided to rebuild it using Arch Linux with Kodi as the media player. The trick, I keep finding every time, lies in getting Kodi to start up whenever the machine starts up. I think I've re-figured that out six or seven times by now, and each time after it works I forget all about it. So, I guess I'd better write it down for once so that I've got a snapshot of what I did in case I need to do it again later.

The instructions in the Arch Linux wiki work, but you need to pick the right ones to follow. The short-and-sweet ones with the automagickal AUR package don't work. Forget it.

Install LightDM from the Arch package repository (sudo pacman -S lightdm). Then install the instructions I linked to above to the letter. That means carrying out the following tasks:

Create the file /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config. The file should contain only the following text in bold (no double quotes): "needs_root_rights = yes"

Follow the LightDM "Enabling autologin" and "Enabling interactive passwordless login" instructions. Create a user named "kodiuser" (you don't need to set a password" and give it access to system groups necessary to access resouces in the system. I used the following command to do this: sudo useradd -c "Kodi Service Account" -G dbus,network,video,audio,optical,storage,users -m kodiuser